A major complaint about Google's Chrome web browser has been that so far, it is still not available on anything other than Windows. Google promised to deliver Chrome to Mac OS X and Linux as well, but as it turns out, this is a little harder than they anticipated, Ben Goodger, Google's Chrome interface lead, has explained in an email. It has also been revealed what toolkit the Linux version of Chrome will use: Gtk+.

When I read this news item my first thought was that QT would have been a better choice. Now that I have spent time and thought about it though really all I have left is apathy. I still think it might have been wiser to start with QT which would have made Windows and Linux easier at least. OS X I might still port because I find QT apps not quite right on OS X.

However the team has decided to use three API's for the three target platforms so they might as well use the one they are most comfortable with. Further GTK+ apps are in general more ubiquitous. As someone else (sbergman?) mentioned, it is quite common for a KDE user to use GTK apps (FF in particular). It is less common for a Gnome user to use QT apps. So if GTK will get the product out faster for them than great. If the application itself is fast, even better.

I do not think the whole "the app speaks with an accent" argument floats though. Chrome does not look or behave like most windows apps. It was a conscious and premeditated decision to make the interface not fit the mold of the typical windows app, so even on the original platform (Windows) Chrome speaks with a "foreign accent."

The Chrome team wrote their own extension of the windows layout framework for pities sake. This is being scrapped entirely from the OS X port and is of unknown status for the Linux port. It is sounding more and more like three browsers with a common engine and presumably theme for look and feel than one browser ported to three platforms. Just bring it to Linux soon please?

I think that is the idea. Chrome will be a native browser on each platform, with a common rendering engine.

I think that the reasoning for that has to be with what Google wants to achieve with Chrome:

* A browser that is light and fast. A cross platform toolkit would probably be slower

* A browser that uses multiple processes for each tab. For this, they plan to use what the OS offers, instead of developing something that would then have to work across each platform. I'm sure this would have been a pretty major undertaking.